


Similes

by god_commissioned_me



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Emotional Abuse, First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Parental Abuse, Loneliness, M/M, Reassurances, References to Dysphoria, Self-Hatred, Self-Worth Issues, TMAHCWeek 2020, Trans Martin Blackwood, bed sharing, body issues, trans author
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:01:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26092285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/god_commissioned_me/pseuds/god_commissioned_me
Summary: Like a moldy wall, the ugly and broken always resurfaces after a while. That’s what happens when the mold has sunk into the bones of a wall, of a person. When you are, at your core, a battered and neglected thing. Martin knows this, and he has accepted it, mostly.Written for TMA Hurt/Comfort Week
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 27
Kudos: 271





	Similes

**Author's Note:**

> [slaps roof of fic] this bad boy can fit so many similes in it  
> as mentioned in the tags, this fic deals with self-worth issues that stem mostly from childhood emotional abuse. while it is not central to the plot, martin is a pre-op trans man in the fic, and there are very brief references to dysphoria related body issues that are based on my own experiences as a pre-op transmasc person

Martin clings to similes like an oar on a raft, using them to navigate his own thoughts and express his feelings when he can manage to get them down on paper. He’s always grasped abstract concepts better than concrete ideas, always understood the world through weaving associations rather than through inflexible rules.

For example: 

His mother is like a brittle rose - all fading beauty and sharp thorns and the threat of falling apart at a single touch.

His studio flat is like a park at midnight - painfully, frightfully empty, with nothing but far and muted sounds to remind him that other people still exist.

His favorite tea is like a single sunbeam in the midst of a storm - a flash of meaningless warmth to distract from the turmoil bogging down his life.

He’s used many similes for himself too, but there’s one in particular that sticks with him, that plays loudly in his head like slam poetry on loop.

Martin is like a moldy wall.

Like a moldy wall, he can be painted over - he can throw on professional clothes and rehearsed words and kind smiles. It’s imperfect, and perhaps if you were to stand close and inspect it you would see the bumps and smears where the paint didn’t quite set, but it’s enough to hide the damage. 

Temporarily, anyway.

The ugly and broken always resurfaces after a while. That’s what happens when the mold has sunk into the bones of a wall, of a person. When you are, at your core, a battered and neglected thing. Martin knows this, and he has accepted it, mostly. 

It still hurts, of course, when it’s pointed out to him.

His mother always finds it first. She has sharp eyes, like a predator lying in wait, ready to pounce at the first sign of weakness. Martin has many weaknesses and they both know it. He paints and paints and paints over himself, but the horrible bits of him always find their way to the surface again. They appear in burnt dinners and too-cold bath water and clumsy hands that can never braid her hair the way she likes. 

She stops asking. When she leaves for the care home, he feels her rejection like the drip of hot wax on fingers - stinging and commanding, but deeply satisfying to pick at because it’s a  _ deserved  _ hurt. It feels like penance.

Strangers find his wrongness too. He can see it in their eyes on the tube, cutting into him like the blades of a surgeon that he doubts he’ll ever afford. He tries to hide, squeezing into too-small binders and drowning in too-big shirts, but if he can’t hide from himself he thinks it’s laughable to imagine he can hide from other people. 

Like a moldy wall, everyone who touches Martin is dirtied by him. Martin has known for years that everyone who brushes against him leaves stained and worse for having been in the crumbling house of his life. For all he tries to protect those he loves from his ugliness, no one is unscathed. His mother is not exempt. The last time he tried to hug her, at the age of twelve, he’d stepped on her foot and made her eyes gleam with anger and pain. She shouted. He has not offered a hug to anyone since, though for years he clung to an oversized stuffed bear when he cried himself to sleep. 

For a few years longer, he’d thought the soft broadness of his arms might have been good for hugging, and the height of his chin good for tucking over the tops of heads, but his few crushed attempts at flirting in school hallways quickly taught him that his body wasn’t one for wanting anyway. 

All the better, perhaps. It’s easier not to hurt someone when they don’t want you. His mother taught him that.

It isn’t that Martin feels wanted when he sobs into his hands in a cramped storage room. He’s not silly enough to think that the concern in Jon’s eyes (rich amber, speckled like the shadows around a streetlight) is out of anything more than the natural fear of learning your employee has attracted the attention of a worm-infested monster. But however small and basic that care had been, it’s the first care Martin has felt in years. He’d wanted to lean into it, into Jon, when he’d offered sanctuary in the archives. 

He doesn’t. He thinks maybe he will love Jon soon, and that’s a dangerous thing. Martin knows he won’t ask for love in return (not in words anyway; he hasn’t learned to stop begging silently) as easily as he knows he won’t receive it, won’t earn it. It’s no wonder, after all, that a creature of rot and disease sought him out when that’s what he is, what he’s hiding behind nervous smiles and shaking hands offering tea.

He cries into broad palms and his tears run down his wrists like too-thick paint over cracking plaster.

Martin is well-accustomed to the pain of not being enough, but there is a new and rending horror to the realization of what that means in this unfolding world of fear. It burns and destroys where it clamps around his heart, and he wonders if it’s like the sensation of the boiling wax hand that had wrapped around Jon’s.

Jon - Jon is like the injured bird Martin had once carried off the sidewalk by his flat. Small, fragile, hurting, terrified, beating himself into collapse out of fear of being still, out of fear of being touched. But beautiful, despite it, achingly and cloyingly precious, a tiny life that wants to soar to freedom but is doomed to the earth. Like the bird, Martin wonders whether, if he had been more, if he had known more, if - if he could have saved him.

When Martin sits beside Jon in the hospital bed, he remembers how the dirt had clung to his fingers, nails like dark crescent moons, after he’d dug a grave for that bird, and he weeps.

The fog of the Lonely is like cold water over the burn in his heart - not healing, but distracting. Calming. 

No, no, no, the calm is  _ wrong,  _ don’t let it trap you, don’t - 

It rolls through him again, the gentlest touch he’s received in years. The sand beneath him sinks slightly, sagging like everything else Martin has tried to support himself against throughout his life.

It doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters.

Martin… doesn’t. He doesn’t matter.

And it’s okay. He never has, really, and now, at last, it feels  _ right _ . Like he’s stopped fighting the inevitable. Like coming home.

Martin has never had a home before.

“Martin.”

Jon… He would have liked to have had a home with Jon, maybe, if he had been a different kind of person. If he hadn’t dragged rot with him into every space he’s ever entered. 

“Martin, look at me.”

What would the home have been like? If Martin could have earned it, could have cleansed himself before he was ruined down to his core? Would it have felt safe? Would it have been warm? Warmer than here, probably. And drier. Why is the sand wet beneath his trousers? When did he fall to his knees? There is a hand on his shoulder and it’s gentle like the sun first filtering through dawn’s clouds.

“Look at me and tell me what you see.”

And then - Jon’s face is like a window opened toward the sea. It’s open, and there is a terror there, an understanding that a storm may very well tear its way through, destroying and crushing. But there is hope too, a horrible desperation for something lost to return. And - Martin sees for the first time that  _ he  _ is Jon’s lost thing, that Jon is here, that he’s found him, that Jon  _ wants  _ him, that he is clinging to his shirt front like a map to guide him -

“... home.” 

The tears clawing their way through Martin’s throat feel cleansing. Like they’re washing away the dark, sour, awfulness that has stolen everything from Martin until now.

“I know the way,” Jon says, and Martin believes him.

Two nights later, their first in the safehouse, Martin throws his binder across the room before he climbs into bed and pulls a heavy quilt up to his neck, hiding. It’s impossible - there is so much of him, lumps where they  _ shouldn’t be,  _ limbs that are too long and too thick to move with the tenderness he holds in his chest. 

Jon crawls into the curve of his body anyway. He buries his face in the space between the quilt and Martin’s chin and whispers against his skin.

“You’re warm.”

“The fire is warmer,” Martin says softly. He hates himself. He hates that Jon feels the need to leave his place in the living room of Daisy’s cottage, to follow him to make sure he doesn’t fall apart. He hates that he  _ will  _ fall apart alone.  _ Like a crumbling, ugly, moldy - _

“You’re warmer. To me. You’re warmer.” Jon pauses. “Like sunlight.”

“Like sunlight?” Martin repeats, and the words slip through his teeth like smoke.

“Mm. My sunlight. You’ve…” Another hesitation, then, soft and vulnerable but thick with determination: “You’ve always been my brightest thing, Martin. I should have - before - I’m sorry I waited so long. But you, you’re so warm, always.” Jon’s hand finds the back of Martin’s head, cradles him, cards his fingers through hair gone white like new paper. 

Martin wants to be new, wants to be fresh and ready for new stories to be told upon. He wants to be rewritten. 

“Together,” Jon says, “we can rewrite together.”

Martin makes a sound of confusion, and Jon groans quietly.

“I’m sorry - I didn’t mean to Know - ”

Martin pulls Jon closer, shushing him. His arms are shaking. 

Jon makes a gentle noise and tilts his head to press chapped lips, rough and hot like fresh baked bread, against Martin’s. It’s startling at first, like the initial shock of a new pair of glasses, revealing the world with a sudden jagged clarity that fades to rightness and comfort. It’s unfamiliar but not unwelcome.

“I love you,” Jon says against his mouth. “You’re beautiful. I love you.”

Martin chokes on his tears and kisses Jon fiercely, claiming the words like he can swallow them, restructure the foundation of himself with this, with being loved, with being valued. He might believe it, even, and isn’t that a terrifying thought? (It’s not.)

“I love you too,” Martin says when he’s able. His heart is jerking like a wounded thing, thumping against his chest like it wants to break free. “I love you so much.”

Jon’s hands move from the back of Martin’s head to cup his cheeks. “Every part of you,” he says, “is worth loving. No, don’t interrupt. Every part of you. There is nothing you have to hide to be worthy.”

Martin hears his own sob distantly, like an irrelevant church bell far away. He holds Jon against his chest and his loathing of that part of him is secondary to the encompassing adoration he feels for the man in his arms.

“You don’t - you don’t need to pretend to be anything,” Jon is saying. “I know you - I Know you - and there is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing in you that could make you any less perfect.” He presses another kiss to the corner of Martin’s lips. “I… I see you, Martin, I see all of you, and there is nothing there that doesn’t deserve love.”

Martin tucks his chin over the top of Jon’s head like he’s always wanted to do (it fits like a nail driven into place, snug, sharp, anchoring) and lets his tears scrub his cheeks free of the layers of choking paint. 

There is nothing dirty beneath after all.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is something of a disaster; i wrote the first half in one sitting weeks ago and then the rest in a desperate rush overnight when i realized h/c week was, uh, now. apologies for that, but i hope you enjoyed it anyway !!  
> as always, find me on tumblr @theyrejustboys


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